Temposchlucker

Usually after the opening and the first half of the middlegame my position is ok. But from there on things all too often go downhill rapidly. Either because I try to work miracles in a non tactical position and end up in time trouble, or I simple play with no plan at all. To fix this problem, I started to analyze my own games. As you can see in my previous post. But I soon realized that my own games lack something. Certain things simply cannot be learned by studying your own games with the aid of a chess engine. And so I decided to study positions from grandmastergames. The first few books from Buckley, Larsen, Yakovlev, Polgar and Dvoretsky were very disappointing. The positions in those books are not computer checked. If Houdini finds 15 better moves than the move proposed by the author, and the difference is >0.30 points, it is too hard to keep your faith in that you are on the right track. And in these times no author has an excuse to not check his analysis by computer. Lucki...

Due to the acquisition of a database with 178 diagrams from high rated problems in memory my OTB tactical vision has become pretty sharp again. Time to take the next step. We talked a lot about relevance of chess positions and improving the speed of finding the moves. A position is relevant when the chances that you encounter it in your own games are high. From this perspective it is logical to keep score of the time you need per move in an OTB game. The moves which costs an unreasonable amount of time indicate the positions where you can gain the most improvement in speed. This is an old idea of mine which I have never put into practice since my tactical ability had to be sharpened first. I almost forgot about this until a conversation with mr. Z about my losses the past year and a half. Yesterday at the club I had the chance to put it into practice. This position took me 21 minutes to decide upon a move: Black to move. What on earth have I been doing those 21 minutes? I'm ...

When you learn something which is radically new to you, you have a nice and clean experiment which shows you the working of the mind. Lately I tried to recognize birds by the sound they make. That is a situation where you have to relate unfamiliar sounds to unfamiliar birds. Which is a harsh thing to do. I recognized 3 states of the mind: The baby stage. The reason you cannot remember anything from the first 3 years of your life is that you had no cues. No cues, no retrieval. You train the sounds of the birds, but they simply don't stick. The unrelated stage. After two weeks of serious training, there are still 38 of the 42 birds I want to learn where I only recognize: "I know that I have heard this sound before, but I don't know to which bird it belongs". The sound has become familiar, but there are no cues that relate it with other things. The connected stage. Here you connect the familiar sounds to familiar birds by cues. Reusing cues. Familiarizati...